Top Ten Tips On Creating a Successful Online Community

More than 90 million people play Online Games yet they spend more
than 90% of their game time “failing”. Most Online Gamers are a member
of a group of like-minded players yet it is almost a sure bet that the
group they joined will cease to exist within a year. Despite being a
hobby so many millions enjoy, failure lurks around every corner. Beyond The Legend
is a new book by veteran gamer and community leader Sean “Dragons”
Stalzer which seeks to change that by revealing the secrets that have
made the oldest, largest and most successful online gaming community an
unparalleled success for the past fifteen years. This top 10 list
touches on a number of the core principles to creating and maintaining a
successful, stable, online community.

10. Recruiting

It is no secret that stability is not something that is very common
in the online world. There are hundreds of thousands of guilds in
existence at any given time and absolutely nothing that limits a
player’s ability to move from one to another. Most guilds will cease to
exist within a matter of months, which is the ultimate indicator of
poor stability. Those groups that remain often have a high percentage
of new faces every few months.

Recruiting, in my opinion, is the cornerstone to building stability.
If you let the wrong people into your organization many bad things
happen. First, their conflicting views, approaches or methods will
create problems that need to be dealt with. When you are busy trying to
build a successful organization, you can’t keep fighting fires all day
long. Design and implement a recruiting practice that attracts
compatible people in personality, goals and play style to increase your
chances for success.

9. Rules

The other major factors that can affect stability and success of any
guild, especially a fledgling one are your rules and policies. While
this goes hand in hand with recruiting, the consideration of what rules
and policies to put in place is not something to be taken lightly. When
rules and policies exist that are not clearly in line with your guild
vision or that do not directly support that vision, they create
friction.

As you establish your guild, before you start recruiting members,
attempt to articulate your vision for the guild, how you intend to reach
that vision, and what rules you need to put in place to support that
vision. Write all of that down and have someone you trust read through
it. Ask them if they feel your vision is clear, if your plan to reach
the vision sounds viable, and if the rules you created to support that
plan do in fact support the vision. Make sure the person is someone you
trust because if they don’t understand why you have a rule to wear
fuzzy bunny slippers at all times, you need to be able to articulate why
or change/remove the rule if wearing fuzzy bunny slippers does not
truly support your plan for world domination.

8. Enforcement

If there is one truism for creating virtual communities it is that
you will encounter issues. Those are often more frequent that you’d
like when your guild is starting out. When there is an issue, jump in
immediately and mediate a resolution. If you don’t know how to mediate a
dispute, you probably shouldn’t be trying to lead an organization of
people to begin with. There are lots of books on that topic so I am not
going to try and teach you here. The point is to step in immediately
and find a solution. Often, that solution is simply to clear up the
miscommunication. You have no emotional baggage tied to the dispute so
fairly evaluate both sides and diffuse it before things explode. That
has the obvious benefit of preventing the immediate issue from getting
out of hand. It also has a more hidden but much more important benefit.
The rest of your guild is watching. They see how you act in those
situations. Your successful handling of those problems will mean they
are more likely to come to you for help before they overreact to
something.

7. Culture

Building a community/guild/clan culture is inevitable. The shared
experiences of your members will cause some form of culture to come into
being. That culture can either be the glue that binds the team
together or it can be the most outwardly obvious symptom as to why the
guild is going to fall apart.

Culture is defined (by www.dictionary.com) as “the behaviors and
beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.”
Each of us participates in a number of different cultures .. at work..
at home.. with friends etc.. If you are a member of a guild you are
also part of that culture.

The key to creating, growing and maintaining the right culture in
your guild is rooted in many of our other top 10 items. Recruiting once
again plays a critical role either in support of or directly against
forming a positive culture. Mismatched personnel who are constantly
getting on each other’s nerves or who have differing play styles can
contribute to creating a non-supportive culture. So once again, right
from the start of a guild, recruiting forms the basis for yet another
building block of a successful, long-term guild. If you have to choose
where to invest your time, it needs to be in good recruiting.

Another area in which the guild leadership can influence culture is
through rules and policies. More specifically, how those policies are
implemented and enforced can have a profound impact on whether there is a
positive or negative culture in the guild. On a day to day basis, one
of the most important things a guild leader can do is to fairly and
consistently enforce guild rules. That doesn’t mean that everyone will
necessarily agree with every decision made but if those decisions are
shown to be consistent and fair with past precedence then those negative
tendrils have a much harder time taking root in your guild culture.

6. Understanding

If someone told you that in order to be a successful community that
you needed to be understanding it might not make intuitive sense at
first but without understanding a guild cannot be successful.
Understanding is a quality that directly supports and contributes to
stability and it is something you cannot mandate into existence. It has
to be nurtured and grown and sometimes fought for.

Let’s begin by defining what I mean when I say you need to have
understanding to be a successful guild. Although voice communications
are increasingly commonplace, the primary interaction people have with
each other within the virtual world is text-based. Even within voice
communication the non-verbal cues that would normally add context to a
comment are not present. There are a variety of facts and figures
floating around about how much of communication is non-verbal but
regardless of which study is taken as fact, non-verbal communication
(gestures, facial expressions, and body language) is an important and
often central aspect to effective understanding.

Since the online world is predominantly text and voice based for our
interactions, the likelihood there will be a misunderstanding is very
high. When misunderstandings happen within virtual communities, they
are tough to spot; even tougher to manage; and often lead to permanent,
negative consequences.

The difference between a successful organization and one that
implodes is understanding. Organizations that are successful have
figured out a way to compensate for the text based and voice based
communication issues so that misunderstandings are far less explosive
and far less likely to result in instability.

5. Compatibility

Another major factor in determining a guild’s ability to be a
long-term success is compatibility. While this criterion is
interrelated to the other topics we have covered, especially recruiting,
there is more to it than just saying, “We all get along!” There are
several different layers to compatibility that we will explore with each
layer being important to the long-term success of the guild. The four
core layers of compatibility that you need to ensure exist within your
guild are:
• Compatibility of your members
• Compatibility of your leadership team
• Compatibility of your rules with your goals
• Compatibility of your goals with your game

As you move forward with establishing or fostering your guild, take
into account that compatibility is very important. Only recruit people
who are compatible with your guild values and goals. Promote to
leadership only people with that extra level of compatibility needed to
work together even during the most difficult of circumstances. Create
rules that are compatible with the goals and values of your guild. Set
goals that are compatible with the gaming worlds you choose to occupy.
If you forget to do even one of those things you will be introducing
instability into your guild that will corrupt your culture and shake
loose the walls of your fortress, causing it to tumble down around you.

4. Excellence

We play games to achieve great things, to be the hero, to be
excellent. We expect excellence in the games we play and it is pretty
obvious what happens to gaming titles that fail to meet the level of
excellence we require. Players demand excellence in their games. When
they do not get excellence in their games, they move on to another game.

Players demand excellence in their guilds in the exact same way they
demand it of their games. Players are investing their valuable time in
the guild and therefore they demand a fair return on their investment.
It is a transaction like any other in life. While the currency is time
and commitment the process is still a transaction. That transaction is
the same as going to the store and buying a gallon of milk or paying
your bill to play a month of your current MMORPG.

When a person joins your guild, they are paying you with their
loyalty, commitment and, most of all, with their time. They invest
those things in your vision, goals and processes and they demand
excellence in return. If you offer an inferior or defective product,
they will purchase a new product from someone else. Your guild is a
commodity and not a very valuable one when it first starts out. You
have no track record of success. You have little of value to offer
anyone other than your promises for the future. You have, at the very
least, thousands of direct competitors on your server all vying for the
same pool of members and many of them have a more established track
record than you do.

There are lots of ways to be excellent in the online gaming world and
most of those ways are things players will demand of their guilds,
whether they realize it or not. Failing to be excellent in those areas
leads to those negative tendrils weaving their way into your guild
culture, weakening the walls of your fortress.

3. Size

Bigger is better, right? That is what popular culture seems to teach
us. However, within the online gaming world that is not a correct
statement. The “best” size for a guild is the size that directly
supports the goals of the guild in exactly the optimal way. So size is a
tricky topic. If you focus on size as an end goal of your guild, then
you will end in disaster. However, if you don’t have an appreciation
for the size needed to achieve your goals that can lead to a failure to
deliver ‘Excellence’ to your members and therefore also cause a guild
failure.

Size, for the sake of size, has a major hidden drawback. That
drawback is that if your members do not know each other well enough,
then they will fail to develop the necessary understanding needed to
avoid drama and blow-ups.

Not having enough size is a problem as well. If you do not have
enough people to fully staff the events, raids and hunts that you plan
to move your guild goals forward then you have two options. Either you
can cancel the plans or you can bring in outsiders to fill the gap.
Regularly canceling plans can send the message that the guild is unable
to provide the excellence your members demand.

Player expectations are very mature these days. They have big
expectations of the guilds they will lend their services to. When
forming a guild, understanding what size you need to be and how fast you
can reasonably achieve that size is a key factor in meeting player
expectations. There are consequences to growing too fast, too slow,
with the wrong mix of people or using the wrong criteria for measuring
your recruits. There is no universal right answer for size except to
say that the right size for your guild is the number of people you need
to support your goals and your ability to deliver your services in an
excellent manner. Your members are like Goldilocks. They don’t want
the guild to be too big or grow too fast. They don’t want the guild to
be too small or grow too slowly. They want it just right. And if you
can’t provide that, someone else already can.

2. Stay Focused

One of the most challenging aspects of creating and running a guild
is staying focused on executing your plan. Society today has a heavy
dose of instant gratification mixed into it. When you couple that with
the fact that in a Massively Multiplayer Game there is always someone
who is ahead of you or nipping at your heels, then we tend to impose
pressure on ourselves to move faster and take shortcuts.

It is a natural human reaction to look around and see characters in
better armor and feel like you need to be doing something more or
something different so you can have those things. It is natural to
compare oneself to other people and then try to take a shortcut to get
to where they are faster. We have all heard the adage about the grass
being greener on the other guy’s lawn. The same applies in gaming,
except with the added kicker of “well if he can do it, so can I.” While
that is probably true, since games are increasingly designed to be
accessible to more players, if you rush through your plan you will
undermine your goals before you achieve them.

Stay focused. It is tempting to think we are the exception to the
rule, that we are smarter than human nature, that our personality will
be powerful enough to allow us to take shortcuts and still emerge
victorious. Taking those shortcuts will result in failure. No matter
how smart you are and how motivated you are when you start playing with
the expectations of players, you are playing with things beyond your
control and much like feeding a wild animal, you will get bitten.

1. Reboot!

If you have made it through all these steps and your guild still
implodes despite your best efforts, the good news is that the online
world allows for nearly infinite retries. You can try again in the same
gaming world.. you can switch to a new world.. you can create a whole
new persona if you want. You can use the same guild format or pick an
entirely new one. The sandbox of online gaming allows you to try to
build the perfect sand castle over and over again. But… if you have
reached this point… you likely tried and failed at least once. Review
the reasons you failed and be completely honest with yourself. You only
waste your time if you mislead yourself by blaming anything other than
the true root causes. Find those causes and figure out what you will do
differently this time around to reach a different and better outcome.

Building a successful community is an art… not a science. The
principles discussed above are what you need to focus on but correctly
applying them, in the right amounts, at the right moments in time, to
create the exact entity that you wish to create is not as simple as
mixing the right amount of flour, eggs and sugar and baking it for the
right amount of time. The recipe differs for everyone so use any
failures you may come across as opportunities to evaluate your recipe
and tweak it for the next try.

All of those topics, and more, are discussed in great detail in Beyond The Legend
. If you are creating an online community, guild or clan then you
should make the time to read the book and avoid the landmines so many
others have stepped on before you.